Tides of Maritinia (28 page)

Wrapping my arms around the missile, I lifted it upright. Letting the shaft lean into the crook between my neck and shoulder, I squatted low to wedge my fingers under the missile's tail. I stood, hands cupped under the heaviest end. I felt the strain in my legs and back. Felt it in my shoulder and the way the muscles in my neck stretched like bands.

I felt around with the toe of my boot until it landed on a rope I'd left lying flat on the floor. Like a tightrope walker, I followed the rope's snaking path through the dome's cluttered shelves. When the short run of rope ended, I knew the door was sixteen paces dead ahead.

Sweat streamed down my forehead to sting my open eye sockets. My torqued back screamed from the strain. But I kept moving, one agonizing step at a time. Counting step number sixteen, I felt with my toe for the single stair that would drop me outside the dome. Not finding it, I took another step forward. Still not locating it, I took another step and repeated the process.

Don't change directions, I told myself. If I'd veered off course, I'd hit the wall. Figuring I'd probably been taking shorter paces thanks to the weight of the missile, I kept up my slow forward progress and was rewarded upon finding the stair on step number nineteen.

I was outside now. I'd turned right but stayed close to the dome wall. My fingers had gone numb with lack of circulation. My head pounded with such ferocity I felt the need to vomit. But I couldn't stop making my way around the dome.

It was impossible to know exactly where I was, so I stopped every few steps to balance on one foot while reaching for the dome wall with the other. When I made contact, I kept on my path. When I didn't make contact, I angled to the right to close the gap between me and the dome.

I'd hugged the dome long enough that my current angle had to be aimed at the water. Abandoning the dome wall, I picked up my pace before my back gave out.

I said.

Greased by sweat, I felt my handhold on the missile slip from my first finger joints to my second. Accelerating my pace, I couldn't keep the missile from sliding down to my fingertips. Hustling toward the water, I knew I'd soon have to slow down or risk falling in.

I'd barely finished that thought when my left foot landed on open air. I tried to pull it back, but my balance was already lurching forward. The missile tipped out of my grasp, and I was instantly surrounded by a rush of seawater.

A pain I'd never felt screeched from my ears and eye sockets. Whether from shock or from being locked too long in one position, my arm muscles were slow to react. Sinking, I gasped with fear only to find water rushing into my lungs. My arms unlocked, and I thrashed in a fit of violent choking.

An instinctual kick of my legs thrust me upward. Propelled by a stroke from my arms, I surfaced.

Treading water, I shook my head to get the water from my ears. Forgetting I had no eyes, I instinctively tried to rub the salt out my sockets and sent lightning bolts of pain through my head. I vomited. Then sputtered water from my lungs. Then vomited some more.

He laughed.

No. I couldn't fail. My destiny wouldn't allow it. This world's future depended on me. What I had to do was find my way out of the water. But which way was the atoll?

I looked all around as if I could see. I listened for the telltale lap of water on stone as if I could hear. Stretching a hand straight out, I spun myself helplessly round and round. The atoll could be just inches out of reach. Or the current could've already sucked me out to sea.

The words stung almost as much as the salt water. But I couldn't think about that now. I had to find the atoll. After slipping off my boots, I picked a direction at random and kicked forward.

I continued on my path for five, now ten seconds. Stopping, I turned around to go back the way I'd come.

I swam with my head raised. Was I getting closer? Farther? Had I properly accounted for drift? Drift in which direction?

I chose another angle. And another. Each failure made my breathing more labored, my swim stroke more desperate.

I kept trying until my arms and legs wearied, and I had to struggle to keep my head above water.

Despair took hold. A thick and unforgiving nothingness crept in from all sides. I wasn't in open water anymore. Unable to see or hear the world around me, I was inside a black box. Crammed into a little hole.

Buried alive.

My words came out absent any emotion. A sure sign that I'd already given up.

I cranked an arm over to slap the water. Then the other arm.

I chose another direction, and something brushed my ankle. Probably a kelp leaf. Then it bumped against my ribs. I stopped swimming and reached with my fingers. Its body was long and solid and ridged with fight scars. It moved gently forward, and my fingers trailed down its flank to a tattered battle flag of a tail.

I spoke aloud. “You've come to scold me again, have you?”

It slapped my fingers with what felt like a flick of its tail, and it was gone. I swam after it. Ten, twenty strokes, I stayed true to the line. The water cooled by several degrees, and I knew I had to be swimming through runoff from the water pumps. I'd drifted all the way to Dome 2.

My fingers landed on a stone wall. Reaching up to press my palms flat on the atoll's stone floor, I summoned up what few reserves of strength I had left and lunged upward, my bare feet scrambling against sharp barnacles until I managed to wiggle my torso onto flat stone.

I stayed that way for a while, my legs dangling in the water, before finding the will to pull myself up the rest of the way.

I was close to Dome 2, but I needed a better idea of exactly where I was. I stood on tender feet and walked away from the water. Four steps later, I reached a sloped wall textured with smooth, overlapping tiles. The water pumps were on the other side of this wall.

I followed the dome a ways. Far enough that I'd moved a fair distance from the water but not so far that I had passed to the lagoon side of the dome, where a soldier could more easily spot me even though it must be dark by now.

I checked my pocket and was somewhat surprised to find the comm unit I'd stolen still wedged inside the wet fabric. I doubted it would work after such a long soak, but maybe one day the data could be recovered. I was curious to see if any of the ramblings I'd made in my journal might be worth saving.

I smiled.

I took a seat on the stone before responding.

His voice turned wary.

He laughed.

He stayed quiet for a while, surely trying to think it all through to see if everything I'd said fit with everything I'd done. He'd soon find the fit as perfect as the one between sky and sea. He'd soon realize the Empire was about to lose Maritinia.

Again.

The shock wave swept across me. I jumped upright as a flash of heat curled the hairs on my hands and the back of my neck. Next came a torrential rain of seawater that pounded my head and shoulders as I followed the dome wall toward the lagoon.

A wave of water yanked my legs out from under me. Landing hard on an elbow, I washed across the stone for a few seconds before finding my feet again. The next wave tried to slap me back down, but I managed to keep my balance, and I walked perpendicular to the current until I relocated the curving dome wall.

Hustling fast as I could, I followed the wall until my hand landed on the arched frame of the dome's only entrance. Stepping up a short stair, I knew I was inside. I turned left to duck behind some barrels I'd scoped out earlier.

This was their last chance to spot me. I expected the guards were still outside, trying to gauge what had happened. Alarms would soon alert them that a lockdown was under way. Some soldiers would pass through this dome on their way down to the underwater structure. If I managed to escape detection again, the game was over. By the time the governor understood what was happening to her contingent, it would be too late.

I'd squatted on the floor. Each beat of my heart meant another second had passed. Each puff of breath meant I was closer to landing the final blow.

My face and ears stung from the recent dousing of salt water. My elbow throbbed from the hard fall. And the lacerations on the balls of my feet chewed at sensitive nerves. I might've tracked bloody footprints, but I had to pray my feet had been freshly washed by the waves that had swamped the atoll.